- Nov 4, 2018Alan,First of all, I'm pleased to find so many points of agreement with my opening salvo (or polemic) against Heidegger. Will's agreement that Heidegger's philosophy smacks of the reactionary was encouraging. Also, your agreement that the design of Hegel's PhG (1807) idiffers from Epistemology, was encouraging.Yet, you challenged my claims to link Heidegger’s Nazism and his philosophy, so I respond here.First, the authoritarian tenor of Being and Time (1927) should be obvious. B&T flows forward with one assertion after another -- not with proofs, but with assertion after assertion. I call that authoritarian.Further, B&T introduces several neologisms without defining them. This is also authoritarian. I don't claim that "the corruption of being a Nazi compromises Heidegger’s philosophy." Rather, I claim that Heidegger's philosophy is thoroughly corrupt, standing all on its own.I am not saying, as you suggest, that German Philosophy during the Nazi period was influenced by its time and place -- as for example, the French Enlightenment "philosophe" in the 1700's, e.g. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, showed considerable agreement with each other.On the contrary -- other Nazi writers never sound like Heidegger. His writing is unique. He himself guarantees this unique status by his neologisms -- words that have no meaning or even appearance in any language except in his own books.No French Enlightenment writer ever stooped to such tactics. As Hegel himself noted -- "Philosophy has no need of a special vocabulary." The common dictionary is sufficient.So, the question arises -- if no other philosopher in the Nazi period wrote like Heidegger, then how can I claim that Heidegger was a Nazi philosopher?I certainly avoid any nonsense about a "Jewish Physics," or claiming any such thing as a "German Philosophy" -- as if science could ever be racially based.Therefore, I raise the authoritarian tenor of Heidegger's work as my key. Here is the commonality with the Nazi ideology -- the idea of a Führer, a Leader who cannot be questioned. In his speeches of 1933, Heidegger expounded his notion of a "Führer Prinzip." It is this IDEA that links Heidegger with the Nazi IDEOLOGY.Thus -- Farias, Ott, Stern and Rockmore DO NOT FALTER. You ask if "Dasein" is a Nazi idea. Stern shows that in the sentences of Heidegger it is Nazi, because Heidegger speaks explicitly of a German Dasein, and a Volkish Dasein, in the service of the Führer.If Stern is correct, then it is equally clear that Heidegger's specific usage of the phrases, "ontological difference" and "being-in-the-world" are equally Nazi, and they surely refer -- without any doubt -- to the Nazi "way of being," given his full body of work.How can 90 years of philosophers be mistaken? Well, generations of philosophers have promoted the urban myth that the Jewish Husserl had actually blessed the Nazi Heidegger! That's how!A sensible person, I maintain, would review Farias, Ott, Stern and Rockmore more carefully, and would hestitate to dismiss them, given the catastrophe of WW2 and of the poverty of modern explanations of this horror. The fact that modernity still lives in DENIAL of the fact that Edmund Husserl rejected Martin Heidegger's claims of succession, is solid evidence that Farias, Ott, Stern and Rockmore are on the right track.I will end by noting that although one could be a Nazi and still be a great Artist, one could never be a Nazi and also be a great Philosopher -- because Ethics and Politics enter into Philosophy in a way that they never enter into Art.Regards,--Paul----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Sunday, November 4, 2018, 12:38:20 AM CDT, 'Alan Ponikvar' ponikvaraj@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
The problem you or anyone has is that there is no obvious link between Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism and his philosophy.
It is interesting that the Nazi’s tried to brand Einstein’s work “Jewish physics” as if the “corruption” of being Jewish compromised the physics.
We find this amusing.
But here you want to claim the corruption of being a Nazi compromises Heidegger’s philosophy.
Well, philosophy does seem to be if not compromised, then at least influenced by its time and place.
There is Western philosophy, ancient Greek and modern philosophy, Christian philosophy, and philosophy that reflects the contemporary secular spirit.
And then there is French, German, and English philosophy that is taken by some commentators to reflect the spirit of a people.
But each of these ways of dividing up the philosophers only works to the extent that there is a philosophic commonality attributable to those so labeled.
That is, if there is nothing that French philosophers share apart from their being French then this is not a useful way of characterizing a philosophy.
So what would be a Nazi philosophy?
Again, not to repeat the error of a Jewish physics it would have to be more than the mere fact that Heidegger being a Nazi any philosophy he wrote must have been Nazi philosophy.
There would have to be some way to identify the philosophic commonality of Nazi philosophy and then find this as a component of Heidegger’s philosophy.
This is where all that is written on Heidegger and his Nazi affiliation falter.
Is Dasein a Nazi philosophic concept? The ontological difference. Is this a Nazi idea? Is being-in-the-world a Nazi way of being?
A sensible person would avoid wasting time contemplating such nonsense.
I will end by noting that bad behavior does not prove the philosophy is bad any more than good behavior proves that the philosophy is good.
- Alan
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